A common application of distributed storage systems in distributed computing is to emulate a memory that is being shared by multiple processors. In addition to fault tolerance, a critical requirement for such systems is the following property often known as "consistency": when the value stored is being updated often, and a client should be able to read the latest version of the value from the storage system. 

We present an application of erasure coding for consistent shared memory emulation, and characterize costs of communication amongst the nodes and their storage costs. We discuss an interesting twist to classical coding gains that explicitly captures the price of maintaining consistency.